Minutes Between
by leftminds
Summary: Duo uncurled and rolled onto his back. Stared at the ceiling like he could find God between the layers of paint. Trowa, half asleep and lazy-eyed, turned on his side to watch him in the dim twilight that passed for night on the colonies. ((drabble, 2x3x2))


"Jesus," Duo said, for the umpteenth time. "Jesus."

After two hours, Trowa was starting to hate Jesus.

"For fuck's sake, Duo, he's going to be fine."

Duo made a sound that was half animalistic whine, half frustrated grunt. He was just about pulling his hair out, hands fisted in it, head bowed, sitting in one of the uncomfortable plastic waiting-room chairs. "How can you say that? How can you say that? Don't fucking act like he didn't just almost fucking die," he exploded, all the guilt and dread and worry of the past day balling up into an anger he could throw at the other man, and which just as quickly unraveled into nothing, "Like he... like he isn't laying in that stupid room all stuck with machines and half the fucking skin on his body burned off."

Trowa sighed and stopped his pacing, walked over to Duo and gently untangled fingers from the rat's nest of hair they'd latched on to. He squatted in front of Duo and firmly held the man's face between his hands.

"He's going to be fine," he repeated, softer this time. "The burns will heal. He's getting the best care and skin grafts Quatre's money can buy," and quirked a small smile at that, but Duo's face remained grim, and he wouldn't meet the green eyes with his own.

Trowa sighed again. "It wasn't your fault."

He got Duo's attention at that.

"He knew what would happen if he was in the blast radius at the mark, and you couldn't have known what was going on with the other team. Your explosives don't mean your mistake," Trowa said, with a smooth confidence he did not entirely feel, and tried to radiate from his pores the calm authority that allowed him to sleep beside lions, and Duo. "You did your job. That's all Heero would have wanted you to do."

He stood and took Duo's hands again, pulling him up and out of the chair. "Come on. They'll be keeping him sedated for a few days yet. You won't do him any good being a mess when he wakes up. Let me take you home."

Duo viciously chewed on his lower lip before nodding, and Trowa guided him out of the hospital and into the car. He was quiet the entire way home, but seemed to have calmed enough to regain some semblance of reason. As they pulled into the parking lot, Trowa said again, "He'll be fine, D," using the pet name only he could get away with. "This is the guy that set his own leg in front of you. It'll be alright."

Duo gave him a startled, suspicious look. "How do you know that story?"

"Quatre told me," Trowa chuckled, and wrapped an arm around Duo's waist as they walked up the stairs to their apartment. Once inside, they mutually agreed to skip dinner, both men too stressed and exhausted to be hungry. They stripped to their underwear in tandem, and crawled into bed beside one another.

Neither found sleep easily, though, dreading whatever grotesque nightmares of the dead and dying that the day would inevitably drag to the forefront. It was an hour, perhaps, before Duo gave up the pretense.

"Hey, Tro?"

Duo uncurled and rolled onto his back. Stared at the ceiling like he could find God between the layers of paint. Trowa, half asleep and lazy-eyed, turned on his side to watch him in the dim twilight that passed for night on the colonies.

"Mm?"

"You think we're going to hell for all the stuff we did?" His words were hard to catch over the air conditioner's white noise, subdued and whisper-soft.

Trowa realized where this was coming from, but it caught him off-guard regardless. It was all too easy for them to forget the threat of death until it stared them in the face. He was of the opinion that Duo thought too much about such things, blamed himself too much for situations he could do nothing about, but knew voicing those thoughts would only incur a swift temper and probably a stint on the couch. And it confused him, the way Duo seemed to vacillate between irreverent atheism and some deep, long-buried faith. Unsure of how to answer, he pulled a page from his partner's book.

"I don't know about you," he said, feigning haughtiness, "But I have a deal worked out. I put up with you all these years, and I'm home free."

It was enough to startle an amused, if short laugh out of Duo, and a soft nudge to Trowa's hip.

They lapsed into silence, but a tension still hung between them like a live wire, shooting off sparks. After a few minutes, Duo spoke again.

"Hey, you think you could make a deal for me too?" There was an edge of desperation under the forced humor that Duo would never have allowed to escape in any other circumstance but this intimate dark. He sounded like he had at fifteen, when everything was desperate, when life was measured in the minutes between deaths, moments they had to grasp and cling to because that might be all there was, might be all there would ever be. Trowa felt something fist in his chest. He closed his eyes.

"Yeah," he said. "Sure."


End file.
